Death Is Not The End: Don McLean: "American Pie"

There are some songs which I grew up hearing on the radio in an uncritical way (for the first few years I simply listened to everything I could and soaked it all up like a sponge, without much of an opinion most of the time) that I understood, and others I would learn to understand…and then there’s this song.

I suspect that you, dear readers, either love or loathe this song; that it somehow either makes some grand sense or that it is a load of old whiffle and not worth much examination.  Well, this here blog exists in part to look at these old DJ-favorite warhorse songs, the ones that purport to say something - about not just the singer’s psyche but a whole generation’s psyche – and who knows how much brain time has already been dedicated to figuring out what this song means, over the decades. 

Now, I’m not sure if I have the stamina to go through every single line of the song* but I figure that if Don McLean is trying to tell us something, then it’s worth trying to decode what it is, and maybe root around a little deeper to figure out what is really going on here.  This is a folk song, lest we forget, about rock ‘n ‘ roll; it is about one day, and everything after.

“A long, long time ago-“ Ok, now, hold it there.  A long, long time ago?  Are we going back to some pre-WWI time when jazz was invented?  Hm, what?  1959?  That’s not a long time ago!  That is (from 1972’s terms) just over a decade or so!  Since when is that a long time ago?  Already McLean is messing with our minds, trying to yank listeners out of their own inner chronology.  This is his 1959 he’s talking about; that cold day, the day that the music died. 

Well, Jesus H. Christ on a skateboard, the music died?  Or maybe I should write it as The Music died?  At the time I first heard this, I knew nothing of Buddy Holly, so the rest of the song made little sense, besides the general puzzle of why anyone would have “drove my Chevy to the levee” upon hearing the news**.  Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens died in a plane crash in early February 1959, the day (Rock) Music died.  This much is known, and that is where this song resides – with the “Good ol’ boys” who sit around drinking and pretty much figure that’s it, as far as music is concerned***.  Already we are in the corner of a rather narrow room, so to speak, and then McLean gives us the rest of the story, full of sock hops and pickup trucks, none of which could really help him cope with Holly’s death.  And then…

Then we get a potted history of rock music in the 60s.  It is fairly obvious that this is a song by a Baby Boomer for other Baby Boomers; indeed one of the reasons it did so well in the first place is that it became an anthem for them, was #1 in the US for a month, in fact.  Now, I can’t do much about being from this generation or that; but what I can say is that this song represents to them (or at least a lot of them; I hate to generalize) a certain truth.  An emotional truth, but not really a factual one, but rock ‘n’ roll is long on myth and sentiment and short on facts.  Thus, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll the piece on Buddy Holly refers to McLean’s song without attribution early on; and there’s a strange denial of events by Greil Marcus, who should really know better, as to what was exciting in music – in his essay on The Beatles, he says that before they arrived “Rock and roll – the radio – felt dull and stupid, a dead end.”  This after writing a piece on girl groups where he says:  “If you were looking for rock and roll between Elvis and The Beatles, girl groups gave you the genuine article.”  Well, which is it?  In truth, there was an awful lot happening between Elvis and The Beatles, and you, dear readers, pretty much already know the roll call:  The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons, Sam Cooke, James Brown, the rise and rise of Motown, Phil Spector, surf rock, the Impressions – the list goes on and on, and yet I can still sense Marcus’ tut-tutting of a lot of this.  Holly’s death was a symbolic one for a loss of innocence; he died, guilty of nothing more than wanting to travel warmly, and the rest of the original rock ‘n’ rollers either joined the Army or got into girl trouble, to put it mildly.  The music kept right on coming, as it always does. 

And now, back to the song.  The middle part, as I said before, is something of a history, and when I was in my sponge mode I would always space out a bit here, as I had very few clues as to what he was going on about.  The King and Queen, for instance.  I didn’t grow up in a household where Elvis was talked about at all, so I had no idea he was the King, and I still have no idea who the Queen is.  The Jester is Bob Dylan**** who somehow steals the King’s “thorny crown”, though just how this happened in real life I have yet to figure out.  People have thankfully given up calling anyone the new Dylan, but Dylan was not then the new Elvis – Elvis was Elvis, and that was that.  (That Dylan sings in a voice “that came from you and me” is a bit much; unless he’s saying that his literal voice is more like the public’s than, oh, Bobby Darin’s, for instance.)  Then there’s a trial (?), then Lenin and Marx are thrown in as signifiers and maybe puns as The Beatles show up, and The Byrds somehow get involved in a football game (“the players tried for a forward pass”:  do any of The Byrds look athletic to you?) while Dylan is injured, and The Beatles return with Sgt. Pepper during half-time; they refuse to leave the field so the players can get on with the game, so I guess the game is called off.  The Rolling Stones (in case you were wondering where they were) turn up as the bad guys, making the narrator oh so angry.  “Fire is the Devil’s only friend*****” he says, out of nowhere.  “Satan laughs in delight” as Altamont and so forth (funny how Woodstock, the ur-Baby Boomer event if there ever was one, isn’t mentioned) happen and the decade ends…

…and there is our narrator, asking a girl who sings the blues for happy news (completely unsure about who this might be; Joni Mitchell perhaps?  Laura Nyro?  No clue) and he goes to the “sacred store” where the man who works there says most pathetically that “the music wouldn’t play” as if all the turntables in the world were now possessed by the devil himself and would only work backwards, or something.  Then the “three men” he admires the most – “the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” also disappear.  At the time I first was getting to know this song, I had utterly no idea what that meant, either in the original or in the tortured metaphors of the song.  Albert Ayler once said that “Trane was the Father, Pharoah is the Son and I am the Holy Ghost”; apparently here it’s Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.  And thus the music has died all over again, rock and roll is effectively finished, and the folk singer is here to say, I guess, that those awful Rolling Stones and in a way The Beatles did the deed.  They killed it, and the good ol’ boys go down to the levee to perhaps throw themselves in, but it’s dry, so they just get drunk themselves.  A silent rust has set in; the sing-a-long quality of the song – and really, this is a kid’s song gussied up for grown-ups – coerces that death out and out, until all that seems to happen is that “the music” dies repeatedly, whether it is by actual deaths of musicians or the death of certain scenes.  The world is now a cold and quiet place, the narrator implies; and rock and roll is indeed gone.

And yet, and yet.  If I go back to this year for a moment where I can clearly remember things, it is this one:  I am with my aunt Debbie.  She has driven me over to her new place – I can still remember the wicker things in the bathroom – and while we’re in the car the radio is on; the engine is quiet enough and the radio is loud enough so I can hear the song.  It’s “Superfly” by Curtis Mayfield.  I know immediately without question it is a great song (it would take me a whole post here to explain why) and if anyone had told me at that moment that “the music wouldn’t play” I would have looked at them blankly, as if they were crazy.  And when I heard this song for the first time about six years later, it would seem to me that this is someone else’s story; that trying to shoehorn in Christianity into this story was awkward at best and inexplicable at worst; and I knew from my upbringing that there was plenty of good music from the 60s that had nothing to do with rock and roll, so what is the point? 

I suppose McLean was trying to sum up the experiences of a generation, those who were so utterly hopeful in the early 60s and then found themselves “lost in space” as he says (oddly enough, Vietnam isn’t mentioned in the song either – then again, it was still happening).  But the generalization that somehow turns every listener into those “good ol’ boys” even if they’re girls – that “we” are all supposed to remember things “we” learned, all went over my head.  I could tell he didn’t like The Rolling Stones but as they were favorites of my mom, well, what about that?  That both Dylan and Elvis make comebacks at the end of the decade is forgotten – gets in the way of the plotline, I suppose – and for someone who claims “I dig those rhythm and blues” the death of Otis Redding is strangely avoided. 

But back to Mayfield:  “Superfly” was just one song of many that started to appear after the epochal Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On album (crucially “Family Affair” was #1 before “American Pie”), ones where some truths about life were starting to be told.  In the UK some of these songs charted, though a lot of them sold in “specialist” shops, so the sales were not included in the regular charts; you can imagine my puzzlement as I looked for Mayfield’s hit only to draw a blank.  "American Pie" is a melodramatic look back at something; it virtually asks its listeners to wallow in the past.  It is retrograde where Mayfield is singing of the now, and now is where music lives.   

In the UK I suppose “American Pie” is taken as given as a song of Americana; Holly kept having hits in the UK long after the US, and in a way didn’t figuratively “die” here in quite the same way. (The whole British Invasion is based in part on Holly’s music, which I like to think would have pleased and surprised him.)  In a way I am not the audience for this song; I never was, even as a kid.  As a history lesson it is flawed at best; I can never forget while listening that I am not part of the “we” and the communal loss of innocence is not something I can share directly, unless I look towards my own experiences of loss – and as I recall at at least one time, it didn’t touch half my friends the way it touched me.  Mass mourning of musicians still happens, but it’s more fragmented now; harder to put into words, let alone a mix-up of religion and football.  And always I trust the musician directly as opposed to someone singing about them******; one can only wonder what Dylan or The Byrds or indeed The Rolling Stones think of this song, for instance.  (Or The Crickets, for that matter – they kept playing, the music didn’t die for them.)  Lamenting the death of a musician is fine, remembering them is fine, but trying to fit in a potted history is asking too much – like too many different flowers in a bouquet.  The best way to remember is to listen; to pay tribute and play the music and know that it will live on.               

*This isn’t The Explicator, at least not the last time I looked.

**I will get back to this in a bit, don’t worry.

***In the UK these people are Teddy boys; there is no equivalent of them in the US, as such, besides the umbrella term “good ol’ boys” (who generally speaking like country music, anyway).

****As things go, Dylan played piano the day after Holly’s death at the scheduled concert; Bobby Vee filled in for Holly.  Even in that literal sense, “the music” didn’t die; it just got played by different musicians.

*****As my husband’s first wife Laura said out loud upon hearing this:  “Fucking godhead shite!” and quite right, too.

******If you want to hear an album about a musican’s impending death that is lovely and beautiful and heartbreakingly great, it’s J Dilla’s Donuts.  That he is an inspiration to everyone coming out of Detroit is also a fitting tribute, I feel.

The Homely Boy: Neil Reid: "Mother of Mine"

Just as there is a gulf between nostalgias between the US and UK, so there are gulfs between the general levels of what could best be called, borrowing from the gardening world, hardy perennials.  These are types of musicians or performers that will always do well, in part because they make the audience feel ‘at home’ and somehow reassured that things may be a bit crazy outside, but here, here is proof that life goes on as it should.  In the US this can be everything from gospel to country to Christian music – the sort of solid and reliable stuff that made (and makes) the nation what it is, the sort of music that little kids are taught to sing at school.  (When I was about eight I learned to sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” up in Canada, a song that could qualify as all three of the above.)  In the UK this area seems to be represented by choirs and in particular by choirboys, or rather the type of young man who could be accurately summed up by the phrase “aw wee choirboy” – one that has no American equivalent, unless you count the young Michael Jackson doing songs like “Ben.”* He is “aw” because he is cute, “wee” because he is young, and the last word is self-descriptive.

I am not sure why this perennial is one, but it is borne out time and again on music-based reality shows; a young man, cute, sweet, the sort a granny in oh say Arbroath would vote for, wins.  Whether he succeeds after his crowning is another matter (does anyone remember Leon Jackson?), as the “aw wee choirboy” type is not exactly cut out for making club bangers or making landfill indie or pursuing a career in electronica.  He is too pure and exalted in a way to do much else but sing whatever his producers have in mind, depending on how amenable he is.  Songs that uplift and inspire are his, love songs and (going back to the roots of the thing) songs of worship suit him best. 

Neil Reid was the original “aw wee choirboy” of modern times, who came to fame on – you can see him here – tv, and this was his big hit.  Looking uncannily like a young Gordon Brown – with a bit, I can’t help it, of Danny Bonaduce from the Partridge Family as well – he sings in his own accent (Motherwellian, if I can put it that way; so many “aw wee choirboys are from Scotland or the north of England) and wears his little suit (complete with a tie!) and in his smiling little man way grabbed a hold of many hearts.  The appeal of the song is absolute and just the sort of thing you’d expect; a song of thankfulness and a raining of blessings.  I can well imagine that this is a song that would make grown men weep, and I know that it must be played at funeral services to this day, but – you guessed it – as far as radio is concerned now, Neil Reid is for chart shows and nothing else.  Perhaps that’s not because he’s so young (twelve at the time) but that the song (like Connie Francis’ “Mama” which I wrote about here) expresses something that is universal and yet private, really beyond words almost, the bond between generations that even when sung about (as Reid sings) is too powerful and immediate for a song.  So many songs are about loves that could be or once were, but the mother-child bond is one that just is, and it is a mark of the time that such a song could do so well.  He not only had a hit single, but a number one album, a remarkable one, and still the only one so far achieved by someone yet to reach their teens.  I cannot ignore the fact that the man who produced this song and his later album was one Ivor Raymonde, father of Simon, who led the Cocteau Twins and was no doubt aware of the odd purity of Reid's voice, that piercing sharpness and beauty and (am I imagining this?  I know I get a bit farfetched at times) found in Elizabeth Fraser that same kind of voice, more or less...

The perennial figure of the choirboy is also - inevitably in this case - one that can only last for so long.  Reid did what he could until his voice broke; Joe McElderry, the latest choirboy, was lucky enough to be almost out of his teens when he won the X Factor two years ago (and he was also lucky to win yet another tv show musical competition, this time for classical singing).  I doubt if someone Reid's age would even make it to the finals of any show now; he would be deemed too young, and I can well imagine the producers wanting someone who could have a career in music and not finance (as Reid has)**.

This song takes this blog back to the beginnings of pop; it is practically Victorian in a time when things all around it are starting to look anything but.  He made people feel cozy and comforted, and he won the talent show at the time - Opportunity Knocks - easily. This song is a pause, a prayer, before 1972 really gets going - a look backward, to better appreciate the battle that is yet to come.

Next up:  correct spelling not required.

 

*Except it's hard to imagine a choirboy singing a song of love and acceptance to a rat.

**All things considered, Reid did very well; Leon Jackson is still out there making music, but has yet to make a comeback, as such.       

Love, Persistent Love: The New Seekers: "Never Ending Song of Love"

Well now, isn't it about time for a happy love song?  The sometimes-grim realism of early 70s music on either side of the Atlantic was buoyed up by some of the more clappy/acoustic/granola folk-rock imaginable, this being a prime example.  In this summer of '71 (was it a hot one? I don't quite remember) the public wanted something that was clearly upbeat, joyous, celebratory - as if to push away any looming darkness, or to just forget about it in the summer sun. 

This song was written by one Delaney Bramlett, a singer-songwriter who, along with his wife Bonnie and their Friends, had the original hit with this in the US; if this song has a countryish tinge, that's because Bramlett was from Mississippi and hung out with Mac Davis, Leon Russell and J.J. Cale, amongst others, as he worked as a session musician/songwriter in the mid-60s, and in the late 60s Eric Clapton joined his group and learned a lot from him*; Clapton's first solo album from 1970 is the fruit of that time, before he went off to hang out with some other musicians from the South.  I used to own that album and it has a slyness - imagine The New Seekers doing "After Midnight" and you'll see what I mean - that would be, well, wrong here.  The New Seekers were just a slightly more rock version of The Seekers, after all, and meant to be wholesome family entertainment; more rousing sing-a-longs and fewer laments, but still no room for the down-home blues Clapton wanted and perhaps needed to dive into at this time.  This shows, rather neatly, the division between the sunshine/smiley-faced pop - all sweetness and light - and the various shadows and glories of rock, which was, as previously mentioned, going through its Classic phase about now, all serious and grown up and just verging on decadence.

The New Seekers never wanted or needed that; here they strum and call out like rebel nuns and (seeing as how this was #2 for over a month) made an awful lot of people quite happy.  (I can imagine this being an earworm, for sure.)  These guys weren't interested in drugs, they just wanted to teach the world to sing, perhaps a bit ambitiously, "in perfect harmony."  (I suppose drugs became popular once people realized such harmony was harder to achieve than expected.)  This kind of pop - almost unimaginable now and most certainly in The Void, stamped "cheery folk rock, Australian division" is a sign of lost innocence; the more anxious songs from this year still get some attention, but this pledge of fidelity and love is lost, a kind of relic from a time when utopian ideas and groups of men and women would sing together unironically and affectionately.  (That ABBA are essentially doing the same kind of thing in Sweden at this time should be noted; they will eventually take this kind of thing to places The New Seekers probably wouldn't go - but I am getting ahead of myself.) 

The worlds of rock and pop are indeed spinning off in different directions, or (confusingly, I know) gradually coming together, unified by artists like Bramlett who could do any kind of song needed for any artist, folk to pop to rock; The New Seekers are Clapton's Australians cousins in this case, though the next time we get to them, dear readers, they'll be doing something definitely pop and Clapton will be more than knee-deep in the blues. 

Next up:  one more for the truckers...  


   

*He gave Clapton the confidence to really sing (he was still a bit nervous about it, I guess).  He also taught George Harrison how to play slide guitar, hence "My Sweet Lord" sounds like a country song gone to India via "He's So Fine." 

Sugar Rush: The Sweet: “Co-Co”

“Little kids like great hooks, interesting vocal styles, seamless arrangements.   They like to dance.  Nothing pretentious or self-important will do when the audience has a two-minute attention span and miniscule discretionary income.  And so the bubblegum hits still sound great today, where much that was critically acclaimed in the same period lacks any distinction.”

Kim Cooper & David Smay, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth

It has come to my attention that in certain quarters in the UK (and elsewhere, I might add) the year 1971 has something of a canonical, near mythical status.  It is the cornerstone in the great Classic Rock era, to be sure, and for some it is the best year for music, ever. This is a judgement based on the albums of the time, for the most part, with a few acceptable singles mentioned as icing on the cake*.  I could be generous and say this is a generational thing, but as someone born in 1967 (and quite happy to rep for that year in any context) it strikes me as being anti-now, and also rather pretentious.  To those who enjoy today’s music perfectly well it says “you don’t know anything about music, really, do you?” and it reaffirms the notions or ideas – however hazy – that things were better “back then” and encourages more repackaging of albums, more box sets, more rarity-hoarding and nostalgia.  That these attitudes are held by and large by men and that all these products and thought pieces and so on are bought and held on to – more than a little defensively I think – by men just shows how the music industry latches on to people during adolescence and vice versa, and that relationship continues until that adolescent need ends, perhaps in middle age, perhaps only really in old age. 

The appreciation of the past, an honourable thing in and of itself (as this here blog attests, or so I hope) gets mixed up with people effectively ring-fencing musical tastes and prejudices until all they end up buying are reissues and perhaps even music before their own era**, anything but music of the present, which is confusing, noisy, repetitive and soulless***. 

Music writers find it easy to break down music into so many building blocks and categories, and some of those are given high honors – say, the albums of ’71 – while others are denigrated and hated.  If we go back to that time – hey, we’re here already! – we can see that while it’s the older brothers and sisters who are buying the albums, it’s the kids who are buying the singles, and that older sibling disdain for kid stuff is by now so hard-wired into music that the arbiters of what is “good” if not “the best” would look at this band and this single and throw it unhesitatingly in the trash. 

Which would be a big mistake, and is the 1971 brigade’s problem, not the kids’.

The profoundization of music that has happened in the mid-to-late 60s has made for a lot of beautiful music, sure, but what 7-year-old has any use for something that drags interminably on, has no real beat, has (ugh) solos and sounds vaguely unhappy?  None, that’s who, and as the albums world grew ever more serious and strange, the world of singles – bubblegum singles – grew as well.  And one of the main offshoots of bubblegum?  That’s right, glam.

With this single we now well and truly enter the Void, a place that is not at all dark or lonely but shiny-shiny stompy-stompy and multi-colored as a candy store.  Only an industry so taken with taking itself so seriously could churn this stuff out on the one hand and then uniformly dump it into the Void on the other, as if it was all some terrible mistake, and that all those album-oriented acts were making better music the whole while, more important music, more influential music…but for now there’s little kids to be exploited (more on that theme later, obvs.) via dolls, actual bubblegum, cereal boxes, lunchboxes, posters/t-shirts/decals – all of which they will later outgrow and reject for more “serious” music when they grow up.  It is that music that they get attached to late that will be what the industry will then exploit again, but with the added vehemence of adolescence, which as we know can be felt at 100 paces and practically glows in the dark.

It can be hard, in the midst of all this, just to appreciate the darn music and enjoy it for what it is.  Bubblegum is great stuff and even the lesser songs have a charm and unpretentiousness to them that is hard to resist.  The Sweet (formerly Sweetshop) were a band in need of a song; they went to fledgling songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman**** and asked for one, and here it is; produced by Phil Wainman, it is perhaps not what the band would have liked (their b-sides, self-written, were more rock, less bubblegum; they played them live and avoided their hits as best they could) but a #2 hit is nothing to sneer at; it got the band noticed as the first glam band besides T. Rex to have a huge hit, and this perhaps was enough.  (Slade’s first hit single around this time did fine, but they were still to crack the Top 10.)

The whole bubblegum/glam dynamic of hopped-up kids screaming and singing along and jumping up and down on their beds to their favourite song doesn’t really sit well in the considered views of those who prefer their music to be, well, grown-up; the very idea of presenting a year like a canon to be studied in college, as opposed to enjoyed outright as pure pleasure is a dead end for music itself.

I know the crossed-arms-tilted-head sceptics have drawn lines, but the magic – yes – of music is that it obliterates all lines, or rather has so many lines within it that it merely laughs at those who have cornered themselves, smug in their self-assuring circles that they have reached the peak, and all they see around them are valleys.  Ultimately I think this isn’t refinement but repression; repression dressed up and decorated with words like ‘heritage’ or ‘vintage’ or ‘for the more discerning listener.’

From my perspective, all this is trying to chain music when all it wants is to be free; Sweet fans have reasons to be grateful that their band and this song haven’t been captured and frozen in ‘the canon’ for perpetuity.  Glam is just warming up now, about to comfort and electrify in turn a nation that needs cheering up; a nation that was happily buying, on a regular basis, quickly made cover albums of recent hits, a kind of sub-bubblegum (“Co-Co” is featured on this album) that calls into question whether the “outpouring of creativity” of singer-songwriters and bands was all that valued in the first place.  Songs like this one are what the 1971 brigade are running away from, when there is nothing scary here, just an "inoffensive, jaunty hit" that kids of all ages can enjoy.  To be against that is to pretty much be against music itself.

Next up:  because sing-a-longs are what summer's about. 

*Strangely enough, three of the singles mentioned in The Word editorial were never UK hits - "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight didn't chart, "Ain't No Sunshine" was a hit for Michael Jackson, not Bill Withers, in '72 and the only "Black Magic Woman" ever in the UK charts was the Fleetwood Mac original from '68. 

**Well, who was buying all those Vera Lynn albums back in 2009?  

***This is known casually as the ‘Ian MacDonald syndrome’.   

**** Who also wrote “Tom Tom Turnaround” for New World and “Chop Chop” for Tony Blackburn, not to mention other early Sweet hits “Little Willy” and “Wig Wam Bam.”

A Child Shall Lead Them: 1910 Fruitgum Company: "Simon Says"

And now we come - all of a sudden, like a sugar rush - to the wonderful world of bubblegum music, which was a haven for garage bands who liked to make music for drunk girls to dance to (to borrow from Franz Ferdinand) as opposed to far-out psychedelic blues jams for those who wanted to get high. One of the great joys of pop is the complete inanity of it, that it does not and really should not be taken so seriously; and as you can see there was a lack of cheery, perky songs around at this time.

So in come the bubblegum army to give the increasingly heavy late 60s a big lift. The biggest source of bubblegum was one Buddah Records, run by Neil Bogart (he who later gave the world KISS and The Village People) - he saw the success of the Monkees and wanted in on the action - luckily he met the producing powerhouse duo of Jerry Kasenetz and Steve Katz, who proceeded to work with the 1910 Fruitgum Company (an actual band from New Jersey, btw, and not just a pseudonym for themselves) to do this song. I cannot say much about it except that the various looks on the faces here show that while this may not be what the group first got together to do (the b-side is called, after all, "Reflections From the Looking Glass") but it was what the kids wanted and it was dumb fun and what is wrong with that? (This is yet perhaps another variation of the childlike qualities of psychedelia, with this game* winning out as little kids were simply too young for anything else.)

What was one way out of the 60s? Bubblegum was maybe not what the serious types would have thought up, but it persisted in the US and in the UK, feeding into and energizing other music to make this old thing called rock 'n' roll new again (bubblegum + rock = glam). As absolutely non-threatening as this song is, it helped to refocus some on what mattered - sweetness, youth and a lightness of touch that during this time in particular were sorely needed. It reassured people - even those who hated playing this game - that there was still a place for simplicity in music, if not out-and-out nonsense. This is playground stuff, but it's the roots for a lot of what is to come; in a way bubblegum is the roots of a lot of good things about the 70s, if by good you also mean silly, addictive, sweet and ridiculous. That's fine; in fact bubblegum may have even pushed the whole 'back to basics' '68 movement along in its own way, just as much as The Band. Who knows? Anything can happen when travelling back to square one.


*Whenever I had to play this game I did well until it got too fast and I invariably messed up; but this song never does speed up or play tricks. Bubblegum's too good-hearted for that.

With Eyes Closed: Andy Williams: "Almost There"

The sudden upsurge in all things 'retro' in the mid-to-late 90s was due to many things; one, I'm guessing, is sheer nostalgia for what once was and could never be again, a kind of relaxed gentility that evokes cocktails, shag rugs, people using 'swell' as an adjective and lots of sleek furniture and witty repartee. A more innocent time? If you were maybe four and remember it as such, well then yes. But there is hardly an innocent character in I'd Rather Be Rich and while it may be a remake of It Started With Eve, it really reminds me of A Room With A View, with Maurice Chevalier as the wise man who tells Sandra Dee she must decide and face up to her real love.

The song comes in just as Williams and Dee are thinking they are going to get away with it - he with marrying her, she with her whole scheme (involving Andy's rival, Robert Goulet). As such he is like a Zeus figure, carrying her away towards Heavenly Haven; her face betrays a sense of unease, though, even as she sincerely likes Andy and wants him to be happy...is she happy?

This is yet another song of waiting, anticipation, Williams' voice smooth and calming as if there can be no other way of living but this - swooping down and scooping up a pretty blonde as part of his genteel, but not innocent, life. I can imagine many a housewife settling down and gliding off to this with or without chemical enhancement - Williams' singing is an audible teddy bear here, urging the listeners to close their eyes and wait, not for too long, because what is going to happen will be soon, and will be better than even this. It is this spaced-out reassurance that many obviously needed, and the tenderness of it distracts the audience from the fact that next door, all hell is breaking loose. That hell will be in the next entry...

That's What Hits Are Made Of: The Searchers: "Sugar and Spice"

And now, for a moment, a step away from the sturm-und-drang of US pop to the somewhat more placid waters of UK pop. The Searchers were one of those revolving-door-membership Liverpool groups that played in Hamburg as well as their hometown, sticking a bit more closely to their skiffle origins than their compatriots The Beatles; and thus they were eagerly sought after by agents & managers hungry for Merseybeat. This song was written by their producer (not that they knew; he used the fine pseudonym Fred Nightingale) Tony Hatch and while it's not exactly going to win any poetry contests, it does its sprightly best (high, close harmonies; plucky ringing guitars, folk-chirpy melody) simply to show the joy a man can have in having his sweetheart, his honey, that love can be as simple as a nursery rhyme and be charming and even poignant for that. To a nation that was still rebuilding some sense of itself and finding its feet musically, as in so many other ways, The Searchers were part of the morale-bolstering Merseybeat tide that became the first wave of the British Invasion (they were the second group to have a hit in the US in '64). That the tide would be welcomed at all is due to an event outside of the literal boundaries of the charts. Merseybeat is reaching its peak here, marking a time when songs this innocent and direct could be big hits. That is about to change, however, as we near the end of 1963.